


Bookstore Girl

by practisewhatyoupeach



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, First Meetings, First Time, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Fluff and Smut, Meet-Cute, Reader-Insert, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:47:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27107446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/practisewhatyoupeach/pseuds/practisewhatyoupeach
Summary: You catch Akaashi’s eye while wandering through a bookshop, and he offers to buy you the book you were both reaching for. See also: Akaashi is a big dumb literature-loving sap who’d been pining for weeks before he finally worked up the nerve to talk to you and painstakingly planned out an opening to do so.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Reader
Comments: 7
Kudos: 105





	1. Bookstore Girl, Part 1

Bookstores offer their own unique sense of peace, a hushed companionability between yourself and other patrons perusing the stacks. 

They’re calming in a way other shops or bars never manage, so stopping by the local indie store on your way home from work has long been your preferred way to wind down and bridge the gap between office hours and the open expanse of your weekend.

You step through the sliding doors. The effect is instantaneous, soothing and rousing all at once. Your eyelids flutter. You take a deep, grounding breath that loosens every muscle in your body. 

Warmth envelopes you like a hug, pushing back the chill evening air. The next breath, and every one after, is heavy with the scent of crisp paper and rich ink. And books, books, _books_ stretch out before you as far as the eye can see. They’re shelved and stacked and propped up on every surface, each one a closed portal, a sealed well of potential, teasing you with their contents. 

The cashier, her face friendly after months of your individual routines overlapping, calls out a greeting that you return with a smile. 

You take your time, focused only on the easy fall of your steps that lead you to each of your usual haunts, your favorite sections, fingertips trailing along the spines as you go. 

The best part of the experience is the quiet. A soft instrumental melody floats down from the speakers overhead, but other than that it’s perfectly, incandescently muted. Any voices are pitched low, their tones weighted with the sort of reverence usually reserved for places of worship. 

Your thoughts are dreamy — senses thoroughly muffled — by the time you reach your last stop. The cant of your head is as much a side effect of your blissed-out state as it is a gesture needed to help you actually read the poetry books’ spines. Rumi and Neruda, Bashō and Browning, Oliver and Angelou. Each name hits like a further shot of comfort to the heart; the smile that curves over your features is the same one that comes from spotting a dear friend in a familiar place.

You stretch out a hand, intending to coax your selection free with a crook of your finger against its top edge.

When suddenly another hand reaches for the same volume, knuckles bumping lightly against your own. 

“Ah.”

Your hands twitch apart in mirrored unison. You look up, and your apology dies on your lips. 

The sum of this stranger comes to you in parts. Black hair curling softly against his temples, around his ears. The sharp, clean line of his jaw. Brows thick and dark like two decisive brushes of ink, currently raised in surprise over the frames of his glasses. The eyes behind them are a verdant, lovely green, the deepest shade of it you’ve ever seen outside of late summer in the shade. 

He’s beautiful — all bundled up in a tailored jacket and a cream-colored sweater.

“Sorry about that,” he says. 

His cheeks and the tip of his (sinfully adorable) snub nose are flushed, like he’d just stepped in from the brisk air outside. 

But his hand where you’d touched just now was almost startlingly hot. 

And you’re quite a ways from the doors; the poetry section is tucked in a corner nearly all the way to the back of the store.

“N-no, that’s okay!” God, was that as loud as it sounded? You half-cover your mouth and muffle a quieter: “Sorry, sorry,” in penance for breaking the sacred silence. 

Tall, dark, and bookish smiles with the smallest quirk of his lips. 

He reaches out again, plucking the book of poems free in a series of careful motions. You’re so caught up ogling his hands — how is someone this pretty even _real_ — that you don’t realize what he’s doing until he has to clear his throat.

“It’s the last copy,” he says, holding the book out to you in offering.

Your eyes dart from the book in his hand to the now-empty space on the shelf. The expression on your face must be even more alarmed than it feels — he chuckles, so rich and rumbling it curls around your heart like a cat and squeezes hard, once.

“No no! Please, you take it.” You’re more careful to keep this a _whispered_ declaration.

“Please, I insist, Miss-” the honorific trails up on a question. 

‘ _He wants to know your name, you dingus_ ,’ calls out a helpful (and kind of harsh, hey now) voice in the back of your mind.

“(Y/n).”

He repeats your name back, thoughtful and slow, like he’s savoring it, committing it to memory. 

“Akaashi Keiji,” he offers in return, bowing slightly at the waist. 

“Thank you.” Cheeks warm, you accept the book with a grateful little dip of your head and your own murmured repetition of his name. You hold the book close, palms clasped loosely over the cover. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine.”

You realize you’ve both been whispering this whole time, voices getting progressively softer. You’d also both been steadily leaning in, drifting more and more into one another’s orbit, to compensate for it. 

You shoot up straight, the book’s corners pressing hard against your chest where you’ve hugged it tight in a fit of nerves. 

Akaashi straightens as well, the motion a little more controlled. But his eyes are still downcast, still trained on you. 

‘ _Oh god_ ,’ you panic. ‘ _What’s wrong, what’s he looking at, is there some stain on my coat, I don’t rememb—’_

You follow his gaze down the length of your own body to where you’re still cradling the book close.

When you glance back up, it’s to see that he’s smiling again, and it’s all in his eyes, all dappled sunlight racing through leaves. Your heart thumps hard, once. 

“This is possibly a little forward of me,” he starts, faltering for a beat in a way that solidifies something in your own mind. “But I’d like to buy that book for you, if that’s alright.”

Quiet thrill pulses through you, sudden and dizzying. 

“You can say no, of course,” he continues, sincere. “I won’t be offended, I know it’s a strange thing for a stranger to offer.”

Akaashi’s expression is calm, other than the determined tilt of his brows. It’s the ever-so-slight tension to his shoulders that gives him away though. He looks like he’s bracing himself. 

He’s _nervous._

And that’s it. You’re gone, swept up in a sudden wave of daring. His sinking self-certainty only serves to buoy your own.

“Do you,” you tilt your head. “Do you go around offering to buy random people books often, then?" 

“This is a first for me, actually,” he admits.

"I mean I wouldn’t be offended if you did. I actually admire that kind of direct action approach to literacy—”

Akaashi laughs. It’s a warm, quiet sort of laugh anyway, but he still covers it with a loose fist. 

“—But why me?" 

He takes a deep breath. Lets his hand fall away.

“Because.” He’s staring at the book again. “Because when you walked in earlier, you looked like you were coming home. You just.” His eyes dart back up to meet yours. “Your whole body, everything about you just _looked_ the same way I feel every time I come in here myself.”

Your pulse is thundering in your ears, straining against your wrists.

“You’re beautiful anyway,” he continues. “But coming through the doors, you were radiant.”

_Is he trying to make you spontaneously combust?_

“I—” You sputter like a tea kettle. 

“Was that okay?” He pushes his glasses up where they’d started to slip. “I’m sorry, that was probably a lot all at once, but you asked. And I meant every word.”

“It’s fine,” you squeak, fanning your face with your hands. “Um, thank you seems a little inadequate here but. _Thank you_.”

“Of course.” He rolls his lips together, trying to smother a sudden and _distinctly smug_ grin. 

_Oh._ Okay then. 

You inhale once. On the exhale you smile your softest, sweetest smile. His startled blink is immensely gratifying. 

“How about this: you can buy me this book if I can treat you to coffee.” You let your expression fall into intense consideration, pretending to run the numbers in your mind before adding: “And possibly a pastry, just so we’re properly even.” 

“Deal,” he agrees, without hesitation.

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

The cashier winks at you over Akaashi’s bowed head as he’s signing off on the sales receipt. 

Even his _handwriting_ is lovely, what the _fuck._

Just as he goes to slide everything back, you cut in—

“Can I actually borrow that pen?” 

You flip open the book and write out your phone number on the back of his receipt, then tuck it between the pages like a bookmark. “So you don’t lose it.” 

Then you hold the book out for Akaashi to take. 

“But I—” He looks utterly thrown. 

“I’ve actually read a lot of the poems in this collection before,” you confess. “But if you borrow it, maybe you can read some and let me know what you think over coffee, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, accepting the book back. He double checks to make sure the receipt is wedged as snug and secure as possible. “Yes. I’d like that.” 

· • —– · one week later · —– • ·

Serendipity neatly placed a coffee shop almost perfectly equidistant to each of your apartments. 

“Strange that we never bumped into each other before now,” you wonder aloud, stepping through the door as Akaashi holds it open for you.

“Very strange, yes,” Akaashi agrees, voice oddly faint.

(Before the date’s over, he confesses in a rush that he’d actually been working up the courage to talk to you for weeks after always spotting you here and at the bookstore.)

Following a repeated offer to keep this your treat, he never once insists on paying. Akaashi accepts the coffee and blueberry muffin you’d promised him with thanks. No ego, no awkwardness. 

He helps you out of your coat and pulls your chair out for you in a series of moments so relaxed it somehow never makes you feel helpless or frail. The gestures are sincere, and so sweetly old-fashioned it melts your heart. 

You talk, and the back and forth is easy as breathing, like this is your fiftieth date together rather than your first.

“I’m an editor actually,” he says, when conversation inevitably turns to the topic of work. 

"That’s amazing,” you say, awed. “Any books I would know about?”

Two bright spots of color bloom high on Akaashi’s cheeks. He clears his throat and absently spins the sleeve on his coffee cup around. Your attention narrows to his hands, the lovely stretch of his fingers and the way the tendons dance across the back. He takes a slow, purposeful sip of his drink.

The sum of these tells would normally add up to embarrassment. And maybe that makes up a little bit of his reaction. But there’s a certain gleam to his green, green eyes and a little crook to his mouth. Akaashi isn’t _embarrassed._

He’s about to let you in on a joke.

“I don’t suppose you’re familiar with _Zombie Knight Zom’bish_?”

A joke clearly made at his own expense. 

“The…shounen manga? About zombie jousting?”

“The very same.”

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·


	2. Bookstore Girl, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akaashi has self doubt like anyone else. He’s just better at hiding it than most.

Akaashi Keiji has made it this far by being consistent.

He’s steady, reliable. Supportive. A hard worker. 

These are qualities that have served him well in every aspect of his life up to now. But recently, he’s started to worry that these same pillars of his personality mean he’s…

Well, boring. 

He’s quiet. Painfully straightforward. Married to his work in the way that an editor of a weekly manga serialization has to be. 

Akaashi spent the better part of the day trapped between manga panels. And feeling guilty for having to cancel your lunch date in favor of dragging Tenma through a sweeping round of edits that basically add up to re-doing this week’s entire chapter of _Zom’bish_ from scratch. 

You had reassured him over the phone that it was fine; that you understood and that you could just go out together some other time. And you’d meant it, he knew you did. 

Somehow that made his guilt _worse_ , though. It had flung Akaashi into an entirely different but equally familiar spiral. Because even more than he worries about being boring, he sometimes hates the part of himself that’s so analytical. 

Here’s the flip side of always hanging back to observe: the damned _hesitancy_ that often leaves him stuck there.

Outside of buying you the book that started all this (and even that had involved literal _weeks_ of pining, planning, and bizarre pep-talks from Bokuto), Akaashi hasn’t really initiated any of the other ‘firsts’ thus far in your relationship. You’d held his hand first, kissed him first, invited him to spend the night at your place first (the two of you had just slept together — actual sleep the whole night through — and he’d woken up more well-rested than he’d felt in years). 

It’s not that he didn’t want to do all of those things prior to you stepping in. Once you’d neatly hopped the hurdle of each ‘first,’ Akaashi had no problem matching you tender gesture for tender gesture. 

He’d just been waiting…

For what, though? He wanted to know you felt the same, certainly. But...just _asking_ outright before making any moves would have given him that. So what is he always waiting f—

A soft knock at the door to his room interrupts his thoughts. You’d swapped apartment keys recently, and you’d texted him an ‘on my way!’ an hour ago, so he’s not alarmed at the intrusion. 

“Come in,” Akaashi calls, swiveling around in his chair and rubbing a knuckle hard into his eye. Which was maybe a bad move. It knocks his glasses askew, and his vision goes wonky for an instant, with black spots dancing at the edges. 

“Special delivery!” you whisper-shout. 

Your face peeking in around the doorjamb is easily the best thing he’s seen all day.

And that’s not just because he’s spent the past god-knows-how-many hours staring at pages upon pages of shambling corpses.

It’s not even because when you pad the rest of the way in, he sees you’ve got two coffee cups in hand. One low-caffeinated beverage for yourself and another, distinctly _high-_ caffeinated one for him.

“You’re an angel,” he breathes. Because you are.

“False,” you say. 

He blinks.

You switch to a shuffling stagger for the last few steps, head lolling, arms stretched out towards him. In your best haunting groan, you continue: “I’m part of the zombie horde, here to eat your braaaaain.”

“God no, not like this,” Akaashi says, a smile curving his lips as he takes both of the drinks from your hands and moves them to safety on his desk.

When he turns back around, it’s to find you in his space. You pluck up his glasses and plop them on the desk as well. Akaashi squints up at you, brows furrowed. He’s not totally blind without them, but staring at multiple screens this long has strained his eyes more than he realized. 

You smooth your palm over his forehead, pushing his bangs back. He leans into the sudden touch, hungry for it, helpless beneath it.

“Gotcha,” you murmur. 

Warm lips press against the space just above his brows. His eyelids flutter closed. The tension in his body eases for the first time in hours.

“Wasn’t much of it left anyway, my brain wouldn’t even be a satisfying snack.”

“How dare you,” you huff, sounding genuinely offended on his behalf. “Your big, beautiful brain is a whole meal. The unholy legions of the walking dead would be lucky to have you.” 

This startles a snort from Akaashi before he can even hope to stop it. He muffles the tail end of it by hauling you in the rest of the way. Pure calm rushes over him. 

He loves it, the way you waltz in and wash away the misery of the day with laughter. It used to be hard to make him laugh outright, but you’ve always managed it, easy as breathing. He loves your wit, your silliness, your easy intellect.

He loves _you_.

He just needs to get the hell out of his own way and say it already.

You both sit there like that for a few silent minutes, finally washing ashore against each other at the end of a long, long day. Your knee wedged between his on the chair. His arms around your waist, his ear pressed against your heart. Your arms draped over his shoulders, your cheek smooshed against the crown of his head. 

“So. How is the _un-dead_ line going?” You finally ask, fingers running through his curls. 

Akaashi just groans in a tired attempt at a zombie mating call. He stretches up to bite softly at the side of your neck.

“That good, huh?” Your laugh hitches when Akaashi exchanges the sink of teeth for a kiss.

He hums against the column of your throat. “Absolutely terrible. Better now though.”

Akaashi has lost count of the number of nights you’ve come over like this, with him staring down a computer screen long into the early morning and you eventually curled up on the bed behind him, offering silent, slumbering companionship. Then, just as the sun started to bleed light in along the horizon, he’d either crawl into your waiting arms or slot himself snugly between the wall and the curve of your back.

This could be like one of those nights. It would be fine. Comfortable. Familiar. 

But he doesn’t want it to be _just_ those things. He’s been pushing himself all day, desperate to wrangle this nightmarish manga chapter into something intelligible. All so he could give you this whole evening. All of his affection and attention focused solely on you. 

A hand cupping the back of your neck reels you in. Akaashi continues mouthing a path down, down, reveling in every quiet whimper, every twitch of your fingers where they grip his shoulders. His bottom lip catches, dragging warm and wet over the skin peeking out from the wings of your shirt collar. 

“I actually just hit send on the last of the corrections.”

His words pool in the hollow of your throat. You go very still, like you’re afraid if you make any sudden movements, they’ll spill out.

“Yeah?” you breathe, so hopeful it absolutely wrecks him.

“Yeah.” He glances up at you through his lashes. “I’m all yours.”

You’d come straight to his place from work, and you’re still in the same blouse, pencil skirt, and dark tights. You look so beautiful it’s almost painful, with your form worn soft at the edges and rumpled ever so slightly. Classic and lived-in and lovely, like an antique photograph. Like a moment in time so perfect fate deigned to intercede and capture it forever. It makes him want—

Just. _Want._

“All mine?” You tease, smile shaky but blinding. 

“Everything.” Whatever you want, he’d give you. “Anything.” 

“Just you.” You cradle his face, thumbs soothing the soft hollows of his cheeks. “Just like this.”

You finally kiss him, slow and aching.

Something in him unravels. There’s a voice in the back of his head shouting at him for making you act first, again. He drowns it out by swiping his tongue along the seam of your lips and licking into your mouth.

Akaashi moans at the spiced taste of tea lacing along the distinct taste of you. He tilts his head to deepen the kiss, the motions easy: lips pliant and searching in turns.

You’re making needy sounds into his mouth. This is still familiar ground, and these sounds are treasured. 

(They’ve been the soundtrack to every fantasy he’s had for the past few months, every time he’s gotten himself off to the thought of you coming undone at his hand. He’s been waiting, content to wait as long as it took to feel _right._ Not perfect, necessarily, but—)

“ _Keiji,_ please. Want you.” 

(Desired. Wanted in return.)

“You’ve got me,” he breathes, just to bask in the way it sets you trembling. “Everything, all of me. I meant it.” 

The words he actually wants are right there, on the cusp but still out of reach. 

He grips your hips, kneading at the flesh there, both to steady you and as leverage to guide you up and then steadily backward to the bed.

When you’re splayed out against his sheets, he pauses, hovering above you for just a beat. 

Akaashi isn't completely unsure of what to do here. He’d had a few girlfriends (and several handsy, post-karaoke make out sessions with Bokuto) throughout college. 

He at least knows enough to understand that sex isn’t some contest, it’s a conversation. And Akaashi is quiet, yes, but he doesn’t hesitate to speak when it means something. This, with you, means more than anything else he can think of. 

“Are you sure?” He asks, hands halted on your waist. “We don’t have to, only if you’re ready.”

“I’m sure, I promise.” To prove it you haul him down the rest of the way with hands fisted in fabric of his old volleyball practice shirt. You tug at the hem until he yanks it off over his head. “You’re a gentleman, and I love that about you, but please, _god_. Akaashi, _touch me._ ”

‘Love’ sends his brain to a screeching halt, blood rushing through his entire body in the wake of the crash. But before he can respond, he’s snapped back to attention by you kissing the point of his chin. 

Akaashi cups your hands where you’d taken the initiative to start undoing the line of your shirt buttons yourself.

“Let me, please.”

The buttons he manages just fine, even with you nibbling distraction along his bottom lip and ghosting your hands over the lean muscle of his torso. You do eventually have to help him with the zipper on your skirt; his hands are miraculously steady enough, that’s not the issue.

“Why is it still…?” Akaashi trails off, heated mind confounded at the way the two ends are still attached even with the zipper down. Passionate acts of ripping clothes from your lover’s body are all well and good in fiction, but he knows you like this skirt. And he likes the look of you in it too much to ruin it. 

“Hold on. There’s a little,” you shimmy to spin the side zipper around front, facing you both, “—a little fastener here, see? You just unhook it and—” Pop, and the skirt’s open, just like that.

“Huh,” Akaashi blinks, legitimately impressed at this bit of wizardry. 

When he looks up, it’s to find you on the edge of laughter. 

“What’s so funny?” he questions, lips twitching.

“It’s just—” a little bubble of mirth bursts in your chest. He’s smiling now too, helpless in the wake of your amusement, even when it’s at his expense. “If you think that’s amazing, wait until you get to the absolute escape room set-up going on with this bra.” 

This bewilders him. Surely you don’t think he’s so inexperienced that he doesn’t know how to—

You shrug off your blouse and shimmy out of the slip beneath it, hands crossed at the hem. Like you’re unwrapping a present.

All to unveil the plush weight of your breasts swelling up from two delicate cups. The lace covering them is thin and patterned such a way that the fabric just looks like another part of you, molded against your skin like leaves on a nymph. Straps no wider than ribbons curve, vine-like, over your shoulders and along your ribs. 

And it’s all green. The same dark shade as his eyes. He feels lightheaded.

“It’s a matched set,” you murmur, wiggling your still-clothed hips.

Akaashi’s mind begins to connect dots he hadn’t even been aware it was plotting out. “But...when did you…”

“I got them a while ago,” your eyes keep darting back to his, then away. Your voice is suddenly very, very small. “To wear when we’d spend the night together. Just in case.” 

Akaashi Keiji feels like the dumbest man to ever walk the face of this planet. 

“You’re gorgeous,” he says, around where his heart is lodged in his throat. “You’re _perfect_ , and I’m so sorry if I ever made you feel like—”

You shush him, palm covering his mouth. He goes obediently quiet, trying to let every ounce of remorse he feels show in his eyes instead. 

“Keiji, you don’t have to be sorry.” Your smile goes sheepish, “I tried to let you know I was interested, so you didn’t have to doubt how I felt.” You free his mouth to stroke down his neck, soothing. “But I never wanted you to feel rushed. It’s just as important for you to feel ready too. And you’re worth waiting for.”

He’s drowning. 

He covers your hand with his own and tucks his chin. Presses a grateful kiss against the tender skin of your inner wrist to feel the pulse there beat, firm and hot, against his lips.

“Show me how to make you feel good,” he says. It’s unsteady: half-plea, half-command, all desperation. 

“You already do.”

You say it as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. As if it’s some intrinsic truth, on the same level as gravity or the sun rising every morning. Your faith steels him. 

Akaashi keeps his touches light at first, searching. Perhaps his analytical nature isn’t so bad, he thinks, if it means he can use every flutter of your lashes, every shift in your breath, to make a study of your pleasure.

He keeps glancing back up to gauge your reactions. He cups your breast, squeezing softly in time with his thumbs rubbing little circles over where your nipples pebble up beneath fabric. This earns him a blissful sigh. But when he locks eyes with you during the act, adjusts the firmness and speed of his touch, wanting _more_ , you shiver. It’s full body tremor that has you arching up into his hands. 

“Like that,” you plead. But your eyes squeeze shut, like it’s too much.

Interesting.

“Do you like it when I look at you?” he ponders, tongue tracing along dividing lines where lace meets skin. 

You just whine. 

He hones in, confident now.

“Any time you went on about my eyes, how much of it was you getting off on having my—” He plucks at a taunt bit of ribbon. You gasp when he lets it snap back against your skin. “—undivided attention.”

“I said it because it’s _true_ ,” you insist. “You do have the prettie-” 

He bites around your nipple in reprimand.

“ _Yes_ ,” you gasp, the confession ripped from you. “Yes, I like it.”

He’ll never be able to look you in the eye again without remembering this moment. You squirming beneath him, hungry for him to pick you apart and desperate for his stare to swallow you whole.

“Then stop looking away,” he murmurs, crooking a knuckle beneath your chin. “Open your eyes and look back at me, (Y/n).”

You do, heavy-lidded but with pupils blown huge. 

“Good girl.”

Your answering whimper goes right to his dick.

_Fuck._ Pure heat pools in his core. He’s straining against his sweatpants, aching from the unsatisfying rub of fabric. Not now though, he determines, not yet. 

The feeling you’ve wrapped him in, of being enough for another person, just the way he is, carries him down the length of your body. 

Your eyes never leave his, even when he gives in to the slightly cruel urge to roll his hips down against yours, just once. He smirks when your hips surge up, trying to urge him back.

“So needy,” he murmurs into the soft stretch of your stomach. 

“Whose fault is that?” Your voice trails up on a squeak when Akaashi points his tongue along the stretch marks bracketing your belly button.

“I’m trying to take my time with you,” he says, simply. 

Akaashi’s hands replace the elastic grip of your tights as you work to wiggle free of them. He follows their thin shadow down the expanse of your legs in a slow drag, until he’s on the floor at the side of the bed, more comfortable on his knees between your thighs than he can ever remember being. 

“You brought me the feast,” he continues. “I’m just following your lead, savoring it.”

He lifts your bare foot, rubs thoughtfully up the arch, along the soul. He smoothes a thumb over a spot where the stitching on your tights left an indent. You squirm, muffling these hiccuping little giggles that half-tempt him to keep going, to see if he can find every ticklish spot, every place he could possibly use to render you a giddy, tearful _mess_ of overwhelmed laughter. 

“D-don’t,” you plead, squirming. “I’ll wind up kicking you in the face without meaning it.”

“Well, so long as you wouldn’t _mean_ it.”

“Keiji,” you whine. 

His stomach flips hard at the use of his first name, and at your obvious distress at the thought of him in pain. He kisses the top of your foot in apology to hide the smile crooking his lips. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll behave.”

“Don’t do _that,_ let’s not get hasty here.” 

Huffing out a laugh, he rubs his temple thoughtfully, quietly adoring, against your knee. And just like that, the words he’s held so close for so long fly free from the cage of his ribs:

“I love you.”

You freeze. 

He should feel guilty for what he’s about to do; it borders on plagiarism. His excuse is simple: Akaashi can’t write poetry to save his life (though _god_ has he tried). This poem, he knows, is one of your favorites, and these words are significant. They aren’t his words though, not really. Not entirely.

But Akaashi means every one of them. He wants to make them his own to give back to you. 

A very selfish part of him wants you to always think of him when you think of this poem, every time from now on, like an echo chamber of your love for words and his love for you. 

“‘I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,” he begins, kissing over the fine bone of your ankle. “‘I love you directly without problems or pride:...’”

Akaashi runs his lips up the curve of your calf. He can’t see your expression from where you’re still lying on the bed above him, speechless. But he can feel it when you start to shake. 

“‘I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,’” A kiss is pressed to the inside of one knee, then the other, as he guides your thighs over his shoulders.“‘-except in this form, where ‘I’ does not exist, nor ‘you...,’”

“ _Keiji-_ ,” you whimper as more kisses dust over the tops of your thighs down, ever inward.

“‘-so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,’” he continues, slower now. He slides his hand over the edge of the bed, searching. You meet him halfway, fingers threading through his. 

“‘-so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.’”

He doesn’t see your eyelids finally flutter shut, but he feels the tender way you brush your thumb against his knuckles.

Crooking a finger to pull the green lace of your panties aside feels a little like he imagines pushing aside a winding trellis of vines might. Like brushing through the final barrier between civilization and uncharted wilderness.

You’re _soaked_.

‘ _Fuck,_ ’ the curse is more air than sound. You quiver where it fans out, hot and obscene, over the drenched spread of your sex.

The last of his kisses map out the parted line of your slit, sneaking in kitten licks all the while. He meant what he said about savoring you; he wants to commit the feel of each silk soft inch to memory. He wants every instance of awareness of his own tongue permanently inseparable from the touch and taste and sensation of your pussy wrapped around it. 

Akaashi pushes back your folds with the solid vee of his fingers.

When he wraps his lips around the bud of your clit, gives an experimental suck, you tighten around him for the span of an instant. He chases it with a broad lave, and you unfurl. You’ve got a hand in his hair, wound tight through his curls. 

“Keiji, your fingers. I need-” you’re pumping your hips now, rubbing against where they’ve spread you open. 

Ah. 

“Mm, that’s right,” he says, thoughtful. “You like my hands too.”

“Of course I do—” you jump in, desperate. 

“All those times you’d offer to warm them up with yours,” he soldiers on, retracting the digits entirely, to your pained sound of protest. “All those times you’d offer to massage them after I’d been typing for hours.”

Your voice trips over a litany of pleas, the pretty sound of your begging mixed with his name.

“All those times I caught you staring-” Akaashi glances up, lids heavy, voice low and languorous. 

“—were because I was picturing _you fucking me with them,_ ” you finish for him.

He’s never heard you like this, utterly unmoored and shameless because of it. 

“Keiji, _please_.”

He rubs a little circle around your hole, gathering your juices, before slipping two fingers in, easy as breathing.

“Better?” 

“ _Yes,_ just ah-” you push down, all velvet hunger, taking him in to the last knuckle.

Akaashi crooks his fingers inside you and gives a single, painfully slow thrust. 

“Now?”

“ _Fuck.”_ The word is a drawn out oath, torn free from your teeth in your bottom lip and flung up toward the ceiling. 

He punctuates the next thrust with a flick of his thumb against your clit. 

You _throb_ around him. 

Akaashi sets his pace like this: patient and teasing in turns. His focus narrows, the entire scope of his senses honed in on the helpless rocking of your hips, the taste of you — heady and rich — coating his tongue, the petal soft clench of your cunt around his fingers. You lay out the pattern for him; all he does is pick it up, and put it into play working you to the edge with studied precision. 

“I’m close, so close.” You hook your ankles behind his shoulders, trapping him in place. “Don’t stop.”

He couldn’t even if he wanted to. Akaashi feels half-possessed, chasing your orgasm with the single-minded focus of a man both starved and in sight of the one thing that can sate him. 

“Come on my fingers,” he rasps. “And I’ll let you lick them clean.”

A visible spasm shudders through your already-trembling body, like a blip on a heart monitor. Akaashi noses against the mound of your pussy, just breathing you in. The kiss he places against your clit shifts to a series of purposeful sucks. You tense. 

“That’s it love, let go for me.”

With a sigh, your body goes utterly, obediently pliant, in repose for the span of an instant.

Then you tighten with a cry, clamping around him at every point of connection. 

Akaashi fucks you through it, his own low moans accompaniment to the high whine of your voice. He thinks you’re calling out a broken version of his name, but it all comes through muffled, like sound heard through deep water, from where your thighs vice over his ears. 

Your form unwinches, gradually relaxing in his hold. 

Settling with his head resting against your thigh, Akaashi bears silent, reverent witness to you drifting back to him from your high.

When you finally pry your eyes open, it’s to find him already licking your slick from his fingers himself. You make a wordless sound of protest. You try to sit up, but your jellied limbs don’t quite cooperate, to his delight. 

Akaashi just blinks, unrepentant, as the pink flash of tongue whorls around each digit.

“Sorry, got greedy,” he pauses long enough to kiss your hip in mock-apology. “Next time.”

Displeased, you wrinkle your nose. Only to turn away with an overwhelmed squeak at the sight of him shamelessly lapping your come from the valley of his palm. 

Eventually, you peek back down at him to squeeze your still-joined hands and say: “Give me one second. Just. Rebooting.” 

“There’s no rush,” he says, squeezing back. “I’m enjoying the view just fine from down here anyway.”

“Not helping, beep boop,” you tack on, nonsensical and dazed. His heart kicks at the bashful smile you try to hide against your shoulder. 

“No rush,” he repeats. Even as he shifts to keep his painfully hard length from rubbing against the side of the mattress. “You let me know when you’re ready for me.” 

“Oh, when I’m _ready_ for you, hm?” 

“ _You’re_ still a little shaky there,” he counters, brows quirked. “Don’t want to overwhelm you.”

“I know you don’t mean that in some ‘my dick is a gift’ way, but still.”

“I just recited poetry between your legs,” he says, wry and amused. “A little credit, please.”

Honestly. He’s not _Oikawa._

“You, ah-” He clears his throat. “You probably are going to have to help me with your bra though.”

You burst into a fit of giggles.

“I’ll talk you through it,” you tease, fingertips brushing along his brows. “No need for that worried expression.”

You do, and you’re right, of course; it’s not half as tricky as he was expecting. Akaashi goes out of his way to touch your bare skin every chance he gets though, awed at the gooseflesh that trails in the wake of each brush.

Slipping off his sweatpants is a much less involved affair, but the way your lips part at the sight of his cock bobbing free is equally gratifying. For the span of about two seconds anyway.

“I take back what I said about your dick being a gift.” Realization suddenly blooms over your features in the form of a wicked grin. “I’d tell you not to let it go to your head but-”

Akaashi turns on his heel like he’s about to march off into the cold, unforgiving night, with nothing to his name but a dick so hard he could probably use it as a club in a self-defense emergency. 

“Waitwaitwait, come back,” you cry. “At least let me-”

Before you can react, he swings back around, fingers attacking the sensitive skin along your ribs. That’s where he keeps you — writhing and twisting with laughter — until you gather enough air to cry for mercy.

He’s caught up in the way you recover: uncurling, opening yourself back up for him even as your muscles ripple and you work to catch your breath. You catch him staring, and with eyes adoring, confess: “I love you, too.”

Akaashi lets himself fall, lips seeking true north against your own, body sinking into the welcoming warmth of yours.

When content hums shift to more pointed keens, he slips a hand between the rolling press of your hips, just to be sure.

“So perfect,” he pants into your mouth, “still so wet for me.”

Wet enough that the lube he grabs from the nightstand might be excessive. He heats some in his palm to stroke over the length of his cock anyway, once you’ve helped him roll the condom on. Akaashi has to bite back a moan, stifle the urge to thrust into his own fist. 

You distract him with hands cradled against his face, beckoning him like a siren back up the welcoming swells of your body.

Twin sighs mingle at the feel of his slicked length sliding up your slit. Your thighs dig encouragement against his sides.

“Relax, love, I’ve got you,” Akaashi says, breath ghosting over your temple. 

“I know,” you stretch your arms up, up, then let them settle there high above your head. “I trust you.”

Akaashi groans outright at the easy presentation, the confident way you’re offering yourself.

“And I like that,” you add, voice shy. “The way you call me ‘love.’”

This frays the last straining thread of his self-control. 

He wraps an arm beneath your body to splay his fingers over the small of your back, arching you off the bed. 

You whimper. 

The gesture is intentional, familiar. Akaashi has long loved resting his hand there. In public, it’s a classy, respectful display of affection. Using it in this moment reminds you both of how perfectly, subtly possessive it is, how guiding. 

He leads you in, just like that, the head of his cock parting your folds

You press your hands flat over stomach He worries for a minute that you’re holding him a bay, but there’s no force to their placement. You keep them there, just to feel the steady flex of his muscles beneath where he’s gone a slightly soft since high school. 

Akaashi fucks you slow, agonizingly so at first. He pulls out to the tip and then sinks back in, languid, lazy. It’s partly because he’s so amped up, so lost in the feel of you around him — everywhere, all-consuming, he’s afraid to go faster, and partly because he knows now you’re of like mind, in this sense. 

“I promised to take my time with you, before.”

He leans down, until his chest molds to the softness of your breasts. Until he can feel every breath filling your body raising him up, imperceptibly, as well. 

“Because I know you like it slow, close,...” 

When he rocks back in, angle shifted, it drives his cock in impossibly deeper. You both moan. 

“ _Intimate,_ ” Akaashi concludes, panting the word into your mouth. 

“Mm,” you hum, nuzzling your nose against his in easy agreement. You smile up at him, and in its light Akaashi feels beautifully, heart-stoppingly _seen_. “Then it’s a good thing you like it that way, too.” 

He can’t begin to imagine what his expression is doing, so he hedges his bets, just tucks his face in the curve of your shoulder. You let him. You even wrap your arms around his shoulders, hand cradling the back of his neck, to keep him there.

“I’ve got you,” you murmur into his hair.

You do. You always do. 

He coasts for so long on unhurried rolls of your hips in tandem with his own, on the hazy pleasure of your welcoming heat stoking him so steadily, so perfectly, that when his orgasm crashes over him it’s all he can do to hold on for dear life. He comes like that, with you wrapped around him so entirely Akaashi isn’t sure where he ends and you begin. 

When he regains the ability to see through the white-out and hear beyond the ringing in his ears, he snakes a hand between your bodies, thumbing over your sensitized clit like the corner of a page until you’re shaking apart beneath him all over again. 

The silence that settles over his room as you both lay there, boneless and sated, feels sacred, hallowed. It occurs to Akaashi that so much of your time together is spent chasing those moments, where companionable quiet settles over everything. 

He falls into what he can easily see becoming ritual: knotting off the condom, cleaning your spent body carefully, gently with tissues from the nightstand (and a smattering of kisses to bring you back to him the rest of the way), then tossing the detritus into a bin across the room.

Akaashi flops down in a rare, graceless moment and gathers you up in his arms. The way you settle there, tucked beneath his chin, cuddling happily, is pure satisfaction made manifest. 

It’s similar to the feeling he used to get after a winning match, or more recently, after hitting send on a list of particularly good revisions. Only, you know, approximately one million times more potent. 

He laces his fingers over the small of your back, their weight calmly grounding to contrast the way they’d been digging desperately into you moments before. He makes a mental note to grab the heating pad from his closet to put there before you fall asleep. For now, he works at the spot, massaging lightly. 

“Your coffee’s probably gone cold,” you eventually note around a yawn. 

“Mmm,” he hums, letting it reverberate where his lips brush your temple. “Not worried about it.”

You snort, good-natured. 

“And after all my hard work, fighting off the rush-hour zombie horde to bring you home nourishment.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he soothes, fingers tracing nonsense patterns along the length of your spine. “How does breakfast in bed sound?”

“I’d like that.”

His heart pumps hard at the sweet pleasure in your tone. The thump of it has to sound like the ocean, pressed against the shell of your ear. 

“But only if we fix it here and I help.” You burrow in, impossibly more snugly against his chest. “I want you all to myself for a little while longer.” 

Akaashi determines then and there to get his work/life balance situation sorted, if it means he can give you this: all his evenings and all his mornings. 

(To start, at least.)

“It’s a date.”

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Title is from Bookstore Girl by Charlie Burg. The poem Akaashi recites between the reader’s legs is Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda. I like to think Mr. Neruda would agree, the way this piece was made to be read aloud was with the words literally breathed like a prayer into a lover’s skin. 
> 
> I'm also on Tumblr! My currently very BNHA-centric writing blog is @smutbardpeach.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Title is from Bookstore Girl by Charlie Burg.


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